67- 102 days

I -was- going to go on about how I hate myself for not having ridden to work today after having to spend hours stuck in traffic, and actually having to turn back on my way home after being immobile for almost 15 minutes.

But then I found something better... my WD Mybook World II has now been up and running, without shutting down and without problems, for 102 days =D

If you recall from 2010, on October 17 one of the drives simply died, out of nowhere. The following days' exchanges with tech support led me to find out just how buggy, dumb and just plain strange external drives from Western Digital are. But, a month later Western Digital was true to their word and I got a replacement hard disk in the mail.

The replacement disk is still in the closet, in its unopened packaging. I had bought a replacement locally while the new drive from WD shipped and decided to keep it instead of opening the new one and stashing that one away. Eventually this year if I get around to upgrading to a desktop PC I'll use that new disk.

Well, it's been 102 days since I last turned the drive off, and it's still going. Without locking up, without making any weird noises, or anything of the sort.

And I'm pretty hopeful it'll keep on going that way, at least for a couple years more :)

End of story, almost

Finally. Exactly one month after I send the defective one out, I got my replacement drive from Western Digital.

I do have to give them credit, that month in the mail was mostly the local post and my package forwarding service. WD's did a pretty good job, and their part was just 4 days long: 2 to process the return, and 2 more to ship a replacement.

But my forwarder forgot to notify their address change, the package got stuck when UPS couldn't find them, and it sat there for a week while everything got cleared up. Which in turn made it miss the weekly flight. It finally flew this week and the package was released today.

Only thing left to do now is open the bag, and pop the replacement into the Mybook World II. And wait to see if it does its magic and syncs up. I'll do that before bed, otherwise I'll be up all night looking at the sync progress every 5 minutes.

Finally out the door

Finally, that's that. I dropped off my WD hard disk at the post office this afternoon. All that's left to do is wait for the replacement to come in, which will probably take around three weeks.

Take what it may, it's good to finally get this one off the top of my head =)

Almost there

One of the most difficult things in this life is bringing home a roll of bubble wrap without popping half of it while in traffic =D

Killing the lights

Ever notice how those little LEDs that you never pay attention to, all of a sudden look like halogen floodlamps at 2 AM? You wake up and think to yourself "wait a minute, didn't I turn off the lights 4 hours ago?"

The light on my network hard drive is especially mean. That thing will light up a room like a Christmas tree. So today I thought to stick a couple of rubber bands on it and repurpose a strip from an old plastic flag I had laying around.

And now it's a whole lot nicer. And the best part is, I can still see what the indicator light is doing.

Lemons

This weekend it came time to pick a few lemons.

It all started when my WD Mybook World Edition II, which I painfully shelled out $260 for, started flashing it's LED in a way that just tells you something did not go well inside. Two days and a few emails to tech support later, I found out the problem was one of the internal disks had failed. Tech support told me to send them the defective hard disk for a replacement, and that started a week long chain of events that finally ended yesterday.

In the end, my hard headedness paid off, since the internal drive diagnostics seem to have gone wrong, and I was about to send them the disk that was in perfect working condition, while keeping the defective one. Good thing I decided to spend a few days running my own diagnostics on the unit.

I also learned quite a bit about how this WD network drive works behind the scenes. It's basically a very small, buggy and limited PC, that only knows how to move hard drives. Which brings me to a very important point... if you have one of these WD network drives, never format both internal disks. You'll kill the operating system and brick your drive. I was fortunate enough to stumble on to that fact by accident, and just barely avoid bricking it =S

So, once again, I seem to have gotten a lemon from Western Digital. Four months in, one of the disks dies. Next week, it's RMA and disk mailing time.

On a side note, I also found a relatively new (about a year old) Maxtor drive which is also defective, and under warranty. I'm surprised at the amount of stuff I have stashed away that I can claim warranty on. It's gonna be like christmas in october =D